Edna O’Brien

Irish novelist Edna O’Brien was born on December 15, 1930, in Tuamgraney, County Clare, to Michael O’Brien and Lena O’Brien (neé Cleary). She was educated at the primary school in Scariff, and, as a boarder (1941-46), at the Convent of Mercy, Loughrea, Co Galway. Her family was opposed to anything to do with literature and later she described her small village as “enclosed, fervid and bigoted”.
According to O’Brien, her mother was a strong, controlling woman who had emigrated temporarily to America and worked for some years as a maid in Brooklyn before returning to Ireland to raise a family. She has said that her father was an “angry drinker” and frequently caused herself and her mother to feel “in danger”.
After leaving school Edna O’Brien moved to Dublin where she worked in a chemists and studied pharmacy. During this period she wrote small pieces for the Irish Press. She read writers such as Tolstoy, Thackeray, and F Scott Fitzgerald. The first book she ever bought was Introducing James Joyce by T.S. Eliot. She has said that Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man made her realise that she wanted to pursue literature for the rest of her life.
In 1954 she married – against her parents’ wished – the Czech/Irish writer Ernest Gébler, nearly twice her age, and the couple moved to London in 1960. They had two sons, Carlos and Sasha, but the marriage was dissolved in 1964. Ernest Gébler died in 1998.
Carlos Gebler in a RTE documentary, Flesh and Blood (2009) said that his father was intensely jealous of his mother’s swift rise to fame as a writer in the early Sixties. He revealed how her volatile marriage to his father broke up over bitter rows when he tried to claim success for her best-selling novels. “They had terrible arguments about money and she had to leave the house and didn’t see her children for a few years. For her, it was a nightmare,” he said.
Edna O’Brien published her first novel, The Country Girls, in 1960. It met with much criticism and was swiftly banned by the Irish Censor for its perceived explicit sexual content. A copy was burned by the curate of her local church in Co Clare. Her following five books, published during the 1960s, met the same fate at the hands of the Irish Censorship Board. O’Brien became a controversial figure in a conservative Catholic Ireland, a legacy that some would argue has impinged upon the critical reception of her work long after the disappearance of such moral indignation.
Edna O’Brien has written plays, children’s books, essays, screenplays, and non-fiction about Ireland. “Countries are either mothers or fathers, and engender the emotional bristle secretly reserved for either sire. Ireland has always been a woman, a womb, a cave, a cow, a Rosaleen, a sow, a bride, a harlot, and, of course, the gaunt Hag of Beare.” (from Mother Ireland, 1976)
Virginia (1981) her play about Virginia Woolf presented the softer side of the feminist writer.
As a short story writer she has published regularly in the New Yorker. Her tribute to her homeland, Mother Ireland (1976), appeared in 1977. It includes seven autobiographical essays, in which O’Brien weaves her own personal history with local customs and ancient Irish lore. Her other non-fiction works include James and Nora, a study of James Joyce’s marriage.
In several of her works O’Brien has focused on the bitterness of women who have experienced failures in their relationship with men. Her women are often victims of their upbringing and her male characters violent or weak or treacherous, as in Time and Tide (1992), which tells of Nell Steadman, an Irish editor living in London, her disappointments in love and marriage with a sadistic husband.
O’Brien also fictionalised real-life events: in the novel In The Forest (2002) based on the murder near where the author grew up of Imelda Riney, her son and a priest in a forest and written soon after the event, was criticised by some as insensitive.
Her impact upon modern Irish writing is considerable. She has received numerous awards for her works, including a Kingsley Amis Award in 1962, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 1990 for Lantern Slides, a collection of short stories, set primarily in Ireland. In 2006, Edna O’ Brien was appointed adjunct professor of English Literature in University College, Dublin, to which she also donated her literary papers. In 2009, she was honoured with the Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award at a special ceremony for that year’s Irish Book Awards in Dublin. She has also been conferred a Doctor of Letters by the University of Limerick in 2004.
The CountryGirls was turned into an immemorable film. Zee & Co, her 1971 novel about marital discord and an ill-advised love triangle, was luckier, featuring Elizabeth Taylor, Susanna York and Michael Caine.

However, fame and success have not necessarily brought her a fortune. As she pointed out in an RTE documentary in 2012, it takes her between two and four years to complete a book, and she’s missed out on the largesse available from the big wallet literary prizes. And then there are the subjects she chooses: “The only things I can write are stories that don’t have Hollywood stamped on them,” she drily observed.
Until 2010 she owned a holiday home in Co Donegal, The Pink House, in Carrickfinn. Her memoir, initially titled Country Girl, is due to be published in 2012 by Faber. The publicity for the book says it will detail her encounters with Marlon Brando, Sam Beckett, Jackie Onassis, Bill Clinton, Robert Mitchum and Gerry Adams, among others. To a journalist who asked her about Brando, she merely said: “I met him at a dinner and we had a very interesting talk. Then he came to my house.” She later added that he stayed in her kitchen.